Recent years have brought the emergence and rapid proliferation of mobile computing devices such as mobile telephones or “handsets” with extensive computing, communication, and input and interaction capabilities (“smart phones”) plus growing array of other mobile computing devices such as touchscreen tablets, “netbooks”, electronic document readers, and laptops in a wide range of sizes with wireless and wired communication capabilities. This proliferation of mobile devices has been accompanied by complementary advances in development and adoption of long range wireless broadband technologies such as 3G and 4G, as well as commonplace deployment of shorter range wireless technologies such as the 802.11 series of wireless standards and “Bluetooth” short range wireless, all with considerable bandwidth. These technologies span multiple radio frequency bands and protocols. Alongside the radio transceivers for such communications capabilities, many of these devices also contain an array of onboard sensors such as cameras, microphones, and GPS receivers plus other locating technologies, as well as considerable fixed-onboard and removable memory for information and multimedia storage. Furthermore, smartphones and similar devices are typically capable of running a wide variety of software applications such as browsers, e-mail clients, media players, and other applications, which in some cases may be installed by the user.
Along with the profusion of smartphones and other mobile, wireless-capable devices, there has also been a dramatic increase in the use of social networks and related technologies for information sharing for consumer as well as for professional uses. Because social network applications on mobile devices tend to use an extensive array of sensors and features, access to the applications and services has heightened concerns about individual, government, and corporate information security, and about possibilities for privacy violations and other unintended and undesirable information sharing. Furthermore, the possible professional and personal use of any given handset presents a complex set of usage contexts under which rules for device capability usage and information access need be considered.
Such sophisticated and capable smartphones and similar devices, along with the vast amounts of information that they can contain and access, present a large set of potential security vulnerabilities (a large “attack surface”) that might allow information to be accessed by malicious parties or allow undesirable use and exploitation of device capabilities for malicious purposes such as “phishing” fraud, other online fraud, or inclusion in botnets for spam transmission, denial-of-service attacks, malicious code distribution, and other undesirable activities. Furthermore, compared with conventional desktop personal computers, smartphone handsets by nature are small and portable and thus more easily stolen. Portability also means that the devices will encounter security contexts that cannot be foreseen, and which may only occur the one time they are used.
Privacy concerns have also grown significantly, given the network capabilities of the devices as well as in some cases the presence of cameras, microphones, and other sensors that may capture sensitive information. The mobile threat landscape is complex and presents a vast set of extant and emergent security and privacy concerns. There is, therefore, a growing need to improve upon not only the degree of protection provided by components and systems that enhance the security of mobile devices, but also to improve on the security of such security-related components and systems themselves, so that both they and the devices and the information that they protect are more robust and are better able to withstand attempts to thwart or otherwise compromise them.
What is needed is a system that facilitates secure communications (transmission) and execution of code that is compatible with handheld and mobile devices and other constrained devices such as those in the “Internet of Things” which refers to unconventional devices that may connect to the Internet. It must be capable of easily reconfiguring for different security contexts, and it must allow every application, sensor, or asset on the device to be managed separately.
One key approach to defending these security-related systems and components from malicious attack and to prevent undesired information disclosure is to have all or parts of the valued information and executable code reside within especially secure areas, partitions, or environments on device hardware that are designed to be inaccessible to unauthorized parties and/or for unauthorized purposes, and are separated from the main device operating system and, in some cases, from certain of its resources. Examples of such secure environments are the Trusted Execution Technology by Intel Corporation http://intel.com, and the TrustZone® by ARM Ltd. http://arm.com. However, none of these allow the independent management of each application, sensor, and asset on the device according to a specified security context. Granular security policy can only be accomplished if each asset/component can be managed independently. A further degree of security can be provided if such secure partitions or areas are also invisible and undetectable to the greatest degrees possible under unauthorized circumstances and by unauthorized parties. The present document describes novel uses and applications of such secure environments (SEs) and secured capabilities.